After nearly an entire day at
the IKEA store down here in Tempe, Arizona, we came away with some
mixed feelings about the whole experience. We’ve always believed that
it represented access to decent (and sometimes great) design for a very
reasonable price. Back in Vermont, we designed/built a kitchen with
Ikea cabinets combined with custom built tall oven/pantry units and it
worked out very well.

On
this house, we’ve always envisioned using their closet systems for
wardrobes in each bedroom (thanks to our friends Marcel and Olga for
leading us to them) and any other location where we needed storage or
affordable shelving.

However,
if you don’t have an IKEA in your city or within driving distance,
shipping is a nightmare. Many items they don’t carry on their web site
(available in-store only), and even if you show up at the store, they
don’t really want to ship it from there! The shipping costs are at
least 25% more for whatever you buy, and if you do end up getting
“special shipping from the store”, it’s even more! It boggles the mind
that they can get this stuff shipped around the world to any of their
hundreds of stores, but they can’t easily get it to the last
destination - to your house... Very frustrating.